You need to be wholesome-maxxing.

Jan 22, 2025

You need to be wholesome-maxxing:

Saying cheese unironically for photos
Writing hand-written thank you notes
Singing along loudly in your car
Putting up photos of people you love at work
Dreaming of a better life and believing it could happen
Loving people unconditionally

A week ago my wife told me that when we started dating, she thought I was very wholesome. Hearing this, I had a knee-jerk negative reaction. The word wholesome conjured to mind people who were cringe, cliched, and conformist. I imagined clean-cut people with big smiles and no dreams and nothing in their head: like extras at a family dinner on a kid-friendly sitcom.

But as I observed my reaction, I realized I didn’t believe these thoughts. As a teenager and young(er) man, I feared being boring. I resisted cliches. I wanted to be exceptional. But over the last decade, it has occurred to me in increments that living my life by doing the opposite of what people expect is as much of a trap as doing what everyone else is doing just to fall in line.

I had spent years avoiding being wholesome. I didn’t want to be someone with the same interests as everyone else. I sought to avoid improving myself physically or morally in visible ways. But as I allowed myself to do “popular” things, to publicly strive, even to be–gasp–sentimental, I grew so much happier.

I realized maybe Dostoevsky was onto something when he said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The formula for happiness did not seem that complicated after all, and I realized that living my life based on my idea of what other people might think (or based on the opening lines of great novels, for that matter) was a dumb idea.

And so even before I came up with the term for it, I’ve been wholesome-maxxing1, because as important as it is for me to be happy, it is even more important for me to be honest with myself. Wholesome-maxxing is a way to be honest with yourself about what you want when you’re afraid you’ll be judged for being like everybody else2.

Here are some of the things I’ve done since I started really leaning into this philosophy the last few years:

On the first chilly day of Fall, I buy myself a Pumpkin Spice Latte.
I rewatch the full Lord of the Rings between Christmas and New Years’ Eve every year.
I pet every dog that will let me.
I’ve started not just not complaining about but enjoying and encouraging my friends and family to take more posed photos at get-togethers and special occasions.
I cook more warm meals at home and encourage people to sit down for family dinner.
I’m indulging in my juvenile, geeky interests, and recently took a little extra money and bought about half of the original Animorphs books.
When I think I look especially good in an outfit that day, or after a new haircut, I take a selfie and send it to my wife.
I signed up and trained for and ran a half marathon–even though everybody in their thirties does it now.

These are all things I didn’t like to admit or didn’t want to do a few years ago because I felt they were cringe or cliched, but they have made my life so much better. I still have internal friction against some of these–I didn’t want to write the one about selfies. I encourage you to figure out what a similar list looks like for you. Indulge in cliches, get a little sentimental, and relieve yourself of the burden of avoiding cringe. Above all, be honest with yourself and cut yourself some slack.

Footnotes

“Maxxing” is internet slang that first started in video game forums and eventually grew to include life advice. The way I first heard it used was on TikTok, where I learned that someone who is “looksmaxxing” is trying to be better looking. But I’ve since heard it used by people advocating a huge range of lifestyles: travel-maxxing, gym-maxxing, skill-maxxing, fashion-maxxing . . . it’s always about getting the maximum output efficiently—or, to take it a step farther, with minimum input. (The original video game term was minmaxxing.) I want to propose something different.

A year and a half ago I published my most popular essay to date, “Do the weirdest thing that feels right.” The central premise of that essay was that we are inundated not with good and bad choices but with too many good-enough choices. When considering all the options that are good enough, you should “do the weirdest thing that feels right.” This is because our idea of what’s weird is actually a construct that is a stand-in for other people’s expectations. Internalized fear of being judged keeps us from being honest with ourselves. If we think one option is as good as all the others but just a little weird, that’s the one we actually want to do, because it has had to fight its way in past other people’s expectations. But the point I’ve had to clarify the most from that essay is that “do the weirdest thing that feels right” is not the same as “do weird shit all the time.” Sometimes, the weirdest thing that feels right will be a very cliched, obvious course of action. Doing the weirdest thing that feels right is a way to be honest with yourself about what you want even when you are afraid you’ll be judged for “going off script.”

Notes and Links

So like, nobody read the last essay. What’s that about? I thought it was pretty good haha. You can check it out here. It’s about how preparing for a new year is a lot like preparing a room in a house for a new purpose.